Texts and Readings in Mathematics

A Course on Topological Groups

K. Chandrasekharan

This book contains the author's notes for a course that he taught at ETH, Zürich. The aim is to lead the reader to a proof of the Peter-Weyl theorem, the basic theorem in the representation theory of compact topological groups. The topological, analytical, and algebraic groundwork needed for the proof is provided as part of the course.

Reviews

"The presentation in this text is clear and to the point. The methods used are good classical ones. This is a good text for a student who knows little about locally compact groups and wants to get an introduction to some of the fundamental ideas needed to begin the study of them."

-- Mathematical Reviews

Contents

1. Topological Preliminaries 2. The Haar measure on a locally compact group 3. Hilbert spaces and the spectral theorem 4. Compact groups and their representations.